


An Anniversary

by celluloidbroomcloset



Category: The Avengers (TV)
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-19
Updated: 2015-06-19
Packaged: 2018-04-05 04:03:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4165038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celluloidbroomcloset/pseuds/celluloidbroomcloset
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cathy remembers her husband on their wedding anniversary, and Steed tries to give her some comfort.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Anniversary

“Do you want another drink?”

Steed was already at the sideboard, splashing a healthy dose of brandy in his glass. Cathy regarded her own empty drink. She’d had several already, but did not feel it.

“Yes, thank you.”

She stared blankly at her own feet while Steed clinked and shuffled behind her. For once, she was glad of his company. This time of year was always difficult for her, and this day in particular. To have anyone, even Steed, rummaging about the flat instead of her sitting there alone and sleepless until the small hours of the morning helped a little. She hadn’t told him, of course. There was no reason to.

He pressed her glass back into her hand and tossed himself out on the sofa behind her. She sat on the floor, reclining against a bunch of pillows while the record player spun on before her. Soft jazz permeated the flat on low volume. 

“Working on anything of interest?” she asked, finally.

“Not particularly. Slow days in the criminal underworld. If this keeps up I shall be pushing pencils in Whitehall.”

Cathy suppressed a smile. The idea of John Steed pushing pencils was as ludicrous as the Queen doing the washing up. That was one point where he and Robert were actually very similar – they could never stand monotony. 

Robert. She’d promised herself that she wouldn’t think about him, not today of all days. It was impossible not to, of course. He was never very far from her thoughts, despite all her efforts to move on. His death still hung like a pall over her life, his memories, delightful as they were, like a film endlessly played before her waking eyes. She missed him sorely, sadly, and the years between had done nothing to lessen the loss. 

“What about you?” said Steed, his sharp voice severing her thoughts. “Anything new in the land of anthropology?”

“We’re usually not concerned with newness, Steed,” she said. “But I did just begin a new paper on African tribal dance.”

“Very interesting.” His voice sounded distant. She turned to look at him.

Nothing at all like Robert, not even in appearance. Handsome in a dissipated sort of way, but not like Robert’s open, fine-boned face. Steed was all dominance and posturing, that man-of-the-world elegance, a certain devil-may-care attitude. Robert had been the most earnest, honest man in the world. There were few men like him, but none so absolutely his opposite as John Steed.

And yet…Cathy often detected something beneath that cynical façade. She wondered if Steed didn’t have as strong ideals as Robert – ideals about justice, and honor, words that he would have scoffed at if she brought them up. He just went about fulfilling those ideals very differently than her husband had.

“Lost in thought, eh?” Steed’s voice once more cut the ties to memory and she glared at him.

“Yes,” she said.

“What about?”

“My husband.”

It was strange. She never thought of Robert as aught but her husband; the man she had married, and was still married to. 

Steed looked a little surprised, but he sipped on his drink and said, casually enough, 

“You never mention him.”

“It hasn’t come up, has it?” 

“Tell me about him.” 

Under other circumstances, Cathy would have simply ignored the request, or found reason to change the subject. But today, of all days…

“He was a graduate student in anthropology when we met.”

She could still recall the day, wet without rain in Oxford, the sky leaden with moisture, and her rushing along the cobbles faster than she should have. She didn’t collide with him, nothing so romantic as that. Just shoved past him through a door to get out of the inclement weather. She remembered turning, thinking to apologize, and caught his gaze – sky-blue eyes behind round spectacles, damp fair hair, handsome without being ostentatious, unaware of his own good looks. That was the first time she remembered seeing him. He caught up to her in the library; spoke to her in that halting, humorous way of his. Focused more on the books she carried than on her – he later confessed he hadn’t even noticed her, just the title of Mason-Smythe’s work on the origins of voodoo. A book he’d been trying to get and failed, because she’d kept it longer than she was allowed. 

“He was brilliant,” Cathy continued. “Scattered, but brilliant. A great mind. His dissertation is still read at Oxford. We married at the end of the year. I was nineteen.”

“A child bride,” quipped Steed.

Cathy bristled. “Old enough to know my mind.” 

“Of course. Go on.” He drank, but his gaze did not waver. Cathy sat back against the pillows.

“He had a very promising career ahead of him, of course, but that sort of thing … well, you know you have to pay your dues. He had been to Africa many times but never lived there long enough to really get a feel for the culture, as he said. We moved to Kenya once I began my own doctorate.”

She didn’t know why she was skipping so much. Could she really tell Steed about how they’d lived in a tiny one room apartment while she finished her undergrad at Oxford and began her fellowship? How they’d slept in a single bed, and worked, pumping coins into the gas meter to keep themselves warm? Where would he have been at that time? Fighting in the war, most likely. Robert hadn’t gone to war. Short-sight and flat feet.

“You liked Kenya,” said Steed, and his voice felt somehow comforting. 

Cathy nodded, curling her knees into herself.

“It was daring and dangerous, but wonderful. Robert always wanted to be immersed in the cultures he studied. He wanted to understand them from more just an academic perspective. I’d spent my life curled up with books; if I’d never met him I would never have actually gone to those countries. He wanted to engage with everyone, learn everything, live the way they did, understand them not as “them” but as … “we.” Human beings.” 

Cathy blinked. She could still see it, the little farm, the deserts and wilderness, the hard work, and the people of the village.

“There was such…abject poverty there. Such suffering. We went to study, but it was impossible to resist trying to help. What difference a little medicine makes, Steed. Clean drinking water. A goat can mean the difference between starvation and affluence, but we take such things for granted. It was illuminating, fascinating, the religion, the beliefs – as rich as our culture but so different, so alien. Yet still a part of our world.” 

“I never take my goats for granted.”

Sometimes she wondered that she didn’t strike him. He seemed incapable of being serious about anything, but at the moment it no longer mattered. She was immersed in memory. She could see the morning sun, and hear the call of the wolves and cackle of hyenas.

“Some of it we consider very backward, of course, but Robert never saw it like that. Just another stitch in the tapestry of human experience, he used to say. He never condescended to them – I’m afraid I did at first. But they loved him, his interest, and his willingness to learn. He would sit up late with friends there, listen to stories, and tell his own in return. He wrote them all down. I have his notebooks still. He wanted to write a book when he came back, put them all together like fairy tales, but deeper than that, more respectful somehow. He wrote them down because he wanted to read them to our children.”

Tears rose to Cathy’s eyes. Robert had always wanted children, but she’d put it off. The wilds of Kenya was no place to raise a child, she’d said. Besides, she had been so immersed in her own work, her own hopes and studies. No time for children.

She rolled over the crack in her voice when she spoke again.

“When he got sick, they came…they all came to his bedside. Everyone in the village, the tribal elders, the mothers, the children. There was this one little boy who just adored him. Robert used to play shadow games with the children and he … this boy loved him. He’d learned to read English and so he read Grimm’s out loud to Robert, sounding out the words. It was a comfort, I think. I hope.”

Cathy stopped. She could smell the sick bed. Flies buzzing in through the windows. Heat, bad enough for her, but unbearable for him. The English doctor wanted to move him and take him to a city where he could get proper medical treatment, but of course it was too late. Robert knew it was too late. He’d known he was going to die. Her brave, strong husband, reduced to a shadow of himself, feverish, begging for water and not knowing when he’d drunk it. She’d been there, at the end, held his hand to the last. Still a strong hand, skeletal as it became. She almost did not believe when the life went out of it. 

Cathy raised her hand to her face. She didn’t want to cry in front of him, of all men.

She felt Steed’s hand on her shoulder. Sturdy, those hands; capable. Not like Robert’s. Robert has very fine, delicate hands. Had. She pulled away and crossed the room with her glass, avoiding his eyes. 

“He sounds like a wonderful fellow,” said Steed.

Cathy swallowed a draught of liquor. “He was.” 

“I don’t suppose you have those stories, eh? I’d like to read them.”

“I could make you a copy.”

“That would be nice.”

It took her moment to turn. She had grown accustomed to him looking at her – lascivious at times, annoyed at others, always a touch wary. This look, though, was a new one. Sympathetic, pitying even. Her gall rose.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“No cute little joke, no tiny jab? Nothing to say?” 

“Contrary to popular belief, Mrs. Gale, I do have some human feeling. Your husband sounds like he was a wonderful man. He would have to be, wouldn’t he?”

The implication was clear and Cathy felt a ripple of shame. She sat down on the sofa beside him.

“I’m sorry, Steed. It’s…today would have been our anniversary.”

“I see.” There was a moment of silence. “Why didn’t you stay in Kenya?”

She took a deep breath. “It would have been dangerous for a woman alone…”

“When did you ever let that stop you?”

Cathy had to smile. “I just couldn’t stand it without him. I came back and went to work for the British Museum. Then…”

“I walked into your life.” 

“There were a few things in between, Steed.”

“Unimportant ones.” As though that ended the conversation, he clapped his glass down on the table. “Well, I’d best be off. It’s getting late and I’m fagged out for the night.”

Cathy nodded, though she was a little disappointed to see him go. Talking to him – to anyone, really – about Robert had helped. She followed him to the door.

“Good night, Steed. Thank you.”

“Thank you for the drink” He paused, hat in hand. “I’m not Robert, but…happy anniversary, Cathy.”

His mouth touched hers. If Cathy had thought – had ever thought – what it would be like to kiss John Steed, she did not expect this. Not this curious tenderness. His mouth was soft, warm, and flavored by the brandy; a sweet, oddly delicate flavor. It was a chaste kiss and he did not try to make it more. He wasn’t teasing her; he was just kissing her. One hand gripped her shoulder, not hard, holding her steady. 

It took Cathy a moment to realize that she was kissing him back. She wanted to kiss him. Her hand tentatively touched his chest. The silk shirt soft under her palm, the warm skin beneath concealed hard muscle. And his mouth, sensual and terrifying, ignited something inside her, a forgotten longing. She felt all the arguments against him fading away at the sudden sense of wanting and being wanted.

He broke the kiss before she did, though he seemed loath to do it. His mouth was stained with her lipstick, lips shining wet from her kiss. But it was his eyes that made her heartbeat quicken. This being a night for firsts, there was no joke, no flippancy, but something so earnest and vulnerable in those grey eyes that it embarrassed her. Then it vanished when he flashed a quick smile and tapped his hat into place.

“Good night, Mrs. Gale.”

He was gone, the door closed fast behind him. Cathy’s heart thumped hard in her chest and she realized she was grinding her back teeth. She could still feel his hand where it held her shoulder. He was nothing at all like Robert; not like the gentle, decent, chivalric soul she still loved with all her heart. She brought her fingers to her lips. Not like him at all.


End file.
